Will Nixon is the co-author with Michael Perkins of Walking Woodstock: Journeys into the Wild Heart of America’s Most Famous Small Town and The Pocket Guide to Woodstock, both #1 bestsellers of the year at The Golden Notebook, Woodstock’s independent bookstore. After writing an acrostic poem as a gift to his friend, “Michael Perkins, Poet,” he set out to see how much of Woodstock he could put into poems.

Called “a poetic coming of age story” this collection ranges from tales about a childhood swimming hole to college misadventures in the California desert to a snowbound holiday with a Jewish girlfriend who wanted to crown her first Christmas tree with a black bra. There are stories of gentrifying Hoboken in the 1980s, plus a recasting of the poet’s family as zombies from Night of the Living Dead.

“A born storyteller” loosely chronicles his life from a suburban childhood to young adulthood in Hoboken and Manhattan to his escape to a Catskills log cabin in “narrative poems” that “strike a rare balance between a child’s sense of wonder and a skeptic’s dry, knowing assessment of the world.” Along the way the poems recall childhood pranks with a chemistry set, lusty assaults on Manhattan, the rise and fall of a marriage, a Thoreauvian flight to the mountains, and the loss of loved ones, including a mother who did, indeed, return one day as a ruffed grouse, “a feathered cannonball.”

The Pocket Guide to Woodstock

198 pages, Bushwhack Books
by Michael Perkins and Will Nixon

Join Michael Perkins and Will Nixon, authors of the bestselling Walking Woodstock, for a personal tour of places they’ve explored on foot for years. Learn about the early Dutch settlers and witches, the bluestone quarries and tanneries, the bohemian arts colony, the historic hotels on Overlook Mountain, the concert that didn’t happen here, the Sixties rock ‘n’ rollers including Bob Dylan and Levon Helm, the promoters and the eccentrics, the legends and the history that have made Woodstock world famous.

Walking Woodstock

250 Pages, Bushwhack Books
by Michael Perkins and Will Nixon

Journeys into the Wild Heart of America’s Most Famous Small TownAt a poetry gathering one evening, Michael Perkins and Will Nixon decided to walk across Woodstock, not just the modern town of busy roads but the older village of bluestone quarries, abandoned forest paths, and mountain views they had all to themselves. Walking Woodstock collects their adventures, many first published in the Woodstock Times, that ranged from the delights of finding spring flowers to the fears of a mountain rescue. Full of humor, history, friendship, nature, hikers’ lore, and walkers’ musings, these journeys reveal the wild heart that beats in all of us when we set forth to explore our home terrain on foot.

Insights

About the Author

Will Nixon grew up in the Connecticut suburbs, spent his young adulthood in Hoboken and Manhattan, then moved to a Catskills log cabin in 1996 complete with a wood stove and mice. For years, he wrote environmental journalism, then turned to poetry and personal essays. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and listed in Best American Essays 2004. He now lives in Woodstock, NY with a wall thermostat for heat, but still can't get rid of the mice.